The Impact of Retirement on Happiness and Loneliness in Poland—Evidence from Panel Data

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of retirement on people’s subjective quality of life, as expressed by their levels of happiness and loneliness, in Poland. We analysed five waves of the Social Diagnosis panel survey conducted between 2007 and 2015. To account for unobserved individual heterogeneity, we employed fixed effects ordered logit models and fixed effect logistic models for the panel data. We found that the respondents’ happiness levels did not change after they retired, and that the introduction of interactions between retirement and employment did not alter these findings. However, the results of the loneliness model showed that the probability of being lonely increased among males after retirement. Second, the outcomes of interactions between retirement and employment suggested that not working after retirement increased the likelihood of being lonely among men, whereas engaging in bridge employment decreased the chances of being lonely among men. These findings may indicate that combining retirement with employment may be a source of social interaction, which can provide protection against loneliness, and which may, in turn, be positively related to other factors (i.e., subjective quality of life, health status, and mortality).